Biden talk about working with segregationists criticized

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Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Wednesday lashed out at his Democratic rivals who had condemned his fond recollections of working relationships with segregationists in the Senate, declining to apologize and defending his record on civil rights. The angry exchange shattered, at least for now, the relative comity that had marked the Democratic presidential primary.

Until Wednesday, many of the Democratic candidates had largely taken oblique swipes at Mr. Biden, while the former vice president sought to stay above the fray, training his sights on President Trump instead.

But a day after he invoked the 1970s, an era when he said he could find common ground with other senators — even virulent segregationists — his opponents offered their sharpest criticism yet.

Senator Kamala Harris of California said the former vice president “doesn’t understand the history of our country and the dark history of our country,” and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey said Mr. Biden should immediately apologize for using segregationists to make a point about civility in the Senate.
Ms. Harris and Mr. Booker, who are both black, were not alone: Other candidates including Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont also weighed in with criticism. And even some of Mr. Biden’s senior campaign advisers were privately shaken by his remarks.

Yet for much of the day, Mr. Biden and his campaign appeared publicly unbowed and intent on defending, or at least explaining, his worldview of politics, which is rooted in his early days in the Senate when, he said, legislators who disagreed still worked together. He cited two defenders of segregation, Senators James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman E. Talmadge of Georgia, to make that point.

Apologize for what?” he said Wednesday evening before appearing at a fund-raiser in Maryland, adding that he “could not have disagreed with Jim Eastland more.”

Asked by reporters about Mr. Booker’s demand that he apologize for his remarks, Mr. Biden said: “Cory should apologize. He knows better. There’s not a racist bone in my body. I’ve been involved in civil rights my whole career, period, period, period.”

At another fund-raiser later that evening, Mr. Biden was sharper in his criticism of the two former Southern senators.

We had to put up with the likes of like Jim Eastland and Hermy Talmadge and all those segregationists and all of that,” he said. “And the fact of the matter is that we were able to do it because we were able to win — we were able to beat them on everything they stood for.”

“We in fact detested what they stood for in terms of segregation and all the rest,” he continued.

Mr. Biden, a longtime supporter of the Voting Rights Act who has cited the civil rights movement as motivation for getting into politics, has many African-American allies, and on Wednesday a number of prominent black leaders defended him, including James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the House Democratic whip and the highest-ranking African-American in Congress.

I just really don’t understand for the life of me what the vice president could have been thinking, to bring the names of Mr. Talmadge and the others who are well-known conservative segregationists into any conversation referencing civility,” said Leah Daughtry, a veteran Democratic strategist who ran the 2008 and 2016 Democratic National Conventions and is African-American. She added, “He needs to issue an apology immediately.”

Mr. Biden, who is running for president in part on a message of national unity and reaching out to those with different viewpoints, particularly courted Mr. Eastland, in spite of his racist views and remarks.

The two men developed an “unlikely relationship,” as Mr. Biden put it in his 2007 book, as Mr. Eastland helped Mr. Biden achieve his first seat of power on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mr. Biden and Mr. Eastland sharply disagreed on several civil rights-related matters, but they were also convenient allies, as both were vocal opponents of school integration through busing, a controversial topic at the time.

According to archives of The News Journal, the main newspaper serving Mr. Biden’s hometown, Wilmington, Del., he would also go on to present himself as a go-between on the Judiciary Committee for conservatives like Mr. Eastland and liberals like Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, and to say that his criminal justice positions are “equidistant between the two factions.

He’s already looking ahead to the general election,” said Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, a political advocacy group. “White swing voters may be persuaded by his ability to work across the aisle with segregationists. But that’s not an argument that’s going to work for black Democratic primary voters.”

The remarks also raised questions about Mr. Biden’s political instincts as even allies privately said he could have made a similar argument about his amicable dealings with people who held opposing views without extolling his relationship with notorious segregationists.

Mr. Biden had a similarly mixed relationship with Strom Thurmond, a South Carolina Republican with a history of racist views who was a key figure on the Senate Judiciary Committee in the 1980s and 1990s.

Though Mr. Biden and Mr. Thurmond had several disagreements over civil rights, they worked closely on crime legislation in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1997, Mr. Biden effusively praised him, including glowing words for Thurmond’s life before public office.

“Long before he was a committee chairman; indeed long before he came to the Senate so many years ago, Strom Thurmond was the consummate public servant,” Mr. Biden said.

Mr. Biden punctuated his speech with a joke: “Though he holds the record for the Senate’s longest filibuster, Strom Thurmond is a doer rather than a talker.”

He left out what Mr. Thurmond was filibustering when he set the record: the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which established the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

A number of prominent African-American lawmakers and community leaders came to Mr. Biden’s defense on Wednesday.

“I don’t see anything different in what Biden said to what we all do over here,” Mr. Clyburn said. “He didn’t say anything more than I would say to describe my work with Strom Thurmond and a few others.”

Mr. Clyburn, who participated in civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s and 1970s, said that Democrats of his generation needed to develop working relationships with segregationist Southern politicians like Thurmond, his state’s longtime senator.

The Rev. Joseph Darby, an influential African-American pastor from South Carolina — a state where polls show Mr. Biden with a commanding lead, currently, among black voters — dismissed the notion that Mr. Biden should apologize.

“People look at his overall record rather than cherry-picking some of the things he says,” said Mr. Darby, a longtime ally of Mr. Biden’s who also spoke positively about Ms. Harris and Ms. Warren. “They weren’t the examples I would use, but I don’t think that merits an apology. He was talking about the way the Senate used to work. That’s the way the Senate used to work.”

Joe Biden is not an imaginative man. Nor is he a particularly thoughtful man. Mostly what he is is a garrulous man, a cheerful man, a man who seems convinced he can talk his way through anything, a man who so loves the sound of his own voice he thinks you will, too.

Biden and his people appear to have a theory about how he can win the Democratic nomination and the presidency. His theory is that he can separate out the “existential threat” that is Donald Trump from the people who voted for Donald Trump—and, to a lesser extent, the politicians on the right who have sided with Trump. The Biden theme is that Trump is bad and the secret to saving America is to get rid of him. Then, the things that Americans hate about Washington—mostly, its dysfunction and the inability and unwillingness of its various ideological players to make any kind of common cause whatsoever—will become manageable problems. And he’s just the guy to manage them.

This helps explain just what the hell he might have been thinking by bringing up his ability to work with segregationist senators. It’s clear what he was trying to do was convey a political fact, which is that to get things done sometimes you have to work with people whose views you might revile. You might say he chose the worst possible examples of this, especially since one of the segregationists he chose to illustrate this point was almost certainly a psychopath; indeed, James O. Eastland once said that that “all whites are created equal with certain rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of dead n*****s.”

But to Biden’s mind, this would be the best example, not the worst, since it would support his point. That point being that he has always been self-sacrificing for the better good, and not just an ineffective moralizer who might make himself feel better by wagging his finger in Eastland’s face while failing to get his vote for something.

Buy it or don’t; that’s not the point. The point is that this goes to the heart of what Biden is promising in the wake of Donald Trump: A politics that works because he’ll work with Mitch McConnell.

Activist Democrats don’t want to work with Mitch McConnell. They want to destroy Mitch McConnell. But Mitch McConnell, or someone exactly like him, will either be the Senate Majority Leader in 2021 under a Biden presidency or a very powerful Senate minority leader with enough Republicans willing to stand in the way of Democratic legislation, capable of making sure that bills don’t move forward.

So the Biden bet is that he can convince Democrats they should not run a scorched-earth campaign promising to destroy the GOP, but rather that they should run a campaign about destroying Trump—and doing so in a way that leaves a path for them to deal with the presumably chastened Republicans who will have learned from Trump’s defeat that Trumpism was bad for their party and that they need to change fast.

As Hillary Clinton showed in 2016, treating a significant number of the other party’s voters as “deplorables” beyond salvation is not a way to make friends and influence people. Right now, it seems most Democratic candidates feel that showing disgust not only for Trump but for every single person who voted for him, or who is uneasy with illegal immigration at the border, or who finds socialized medicine frightening is the only appropriate and moral attitude to take.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe the nation is so polarized that their loathing will resonate. But it’s an iffy proposition—so iffy you really have to wonder if Biden falls due to his own big mouth, whether another candidate will immediately move to make exactly the argument he’s making.

Civil rights icon John Lewis said Friday that former Vice President Joe Biden's remarks about his past work with segregationists in the Senate were not offensive, offering the 2020 Democratic front-runner a lifeline after a week of withering criticism from other White House hopefuls.

Biden has been defiant in the face of that criticism, standing by his comments at a fundraiser earlier this week. The quip sparked a backlash from Biden’s rivals in the 2020 primary, particularly from his black opponents.

‘I don't think the remarks are offensive,” Lewis (D-Ga.) told reporters, recounting the range of unsavory people he’s worked shoulder to shoulder with. “During the height of the civil rights movement we worked with people and got to know people that were members of the Klan — people who opposed us, even people who beat us, and arrested us and jailed us.”

But, the longtime Georgia congressman declared, “We never gave up on our fellow human beings, and I will not give up on any human being."

2020 hopeful Tulsi Gabbard criticized fellow Democratic rivals Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris over their condemnation of Joe Biden's remarks about working with segregationists in the Senate.

"Joe Biden did not 'celebrate' or 'coddle' segregationists. His critics have unfairly misrepresented his important message to score cheap political points," the Hawaii congresswoman tweeted on Friday.

Gabbard said she agrees with with Democratic House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn because "in order for Congress and the president to get things done for the American people, there needs to be civility in Washington and in the country — the ability to work with those who we disagree, even those who hold some views which we abhor."

I don't get it.

I think that his Democratic rivals should all apologize to him for slinging mud, and for exploiting the naïve-about-history Millennial voters.

Biden collaborated with powerful members of congress to get things done, including with individuals he had passionate disagreements with. That's what his job as a politician was all about.

He didn't say he collaborated with segregationists like Strom in order to...prolong Segregation, but that he found common ground with that ilk about other issues to get that other stuff done. Exactly what you want in your rep.

In the Seventies and Eighties Congress was still dominated by fossil White guys from the South- the same bunch who had opposed civil rights legislation in the Fifties and Sixties- because they kept getting relected by their local constituents - and gained senority. So Helms and Thurmond et al were the powers at be with a stranglehold on congress out of proportion to their numbers. So who else was Biden gonna horse trade with than the powers at be at the time?

I don't get it.

I think that his Democratic rivals should all apologize to him for slinging mud, and for exploiting the naïve-about-history Millennial voters.

Biden collaborated with powerful members of congress to get things done, including with individuals he had passionate disagreements with. That's what his job as a politician was all about.

It's a Democrat mind f**k.

They're suppose to be evil, racist, NAZI, and now Biden is defending these people, suggesting they did some good together.

He's going off the Democrat's narrative.